Clarks: Made to Last

by Mark Palmer

  T. P. Slim was taken on in New Zealand before, towards the end of the century, a man called John Angell Peck was appointed the sole agent in Australia and New Zealand. Peck became something of a role model for agents worldwide. Whereas sales in Australia and New Zealand in 1899 – the year of his appointment – were £3,948 in Australia and £213 in New Zealand, by 1903 they had reached £16,444 and £7,405 respectively. Peck remained in his post for 41 years, retiring in 1940.

  A showcard for the home market in 1864 depicted a group of men and women playing croquet. ‘Manufacturers of most stylish and fashionable Ladies’ Boots’ was the strapline. Underneath, in smaller print, was added: ‘Every variety of gentlemen’s, ladies’ and children’s boots, shoes and slippers’. In other words, the Clarks considered that their business made shoes for everyone.

  But competition, especially from America, was intensifying and it was important that C. & J. Clark should stand out from other UK shoemakers. Certainly, one of the company’s distinguishing features was its choice of fittings, something that had been pioneered and subsequently developed in the USA. As early as 1848, Clarks ladies’ ‘French shoes’ were offered in three fittings (N, M and W, referring to narrow, medium and wide) and in every size and half size from one to seven.

  Then, in 1880, a further four new fittings (B, C, D and E) were launched. This emphasis on shoes that fitted properly and comfortably had a big influence on the launch in 1883 of the Hygienic range. The idea was to stress the importance of health rather than style. Hygienic boots and shoes came with the implicit backing of the medical profession. As a showcard said: ‘These boots do not deform the feet or cause corns and bunions but are comfortable to wear & make walking a pleasure’. Not perhaps the most sensual of recommendations, but sales were impressive none the less, with William declaring how the results had ‘exceeded our expectations’. The Hygienic range eventually became the Anatomical range.

  New styles were developing – the first ‘ladies’ high-heeled shoes’ appeared in the 1877 price list – and strides were also being made with packaging and branding. The Tor trademark, so-named after Glastonbury Tor, the hill overlooking the town with St Michael’s tower at its summit, was immediately identified with C. & J. Clark, the word ‘Tor’ clearly visible on the soles.

  Shoe-shopping today has for many people become a heightened retail experience. Fun. Daring. Therapeutic, even. And part of that experience is enlivened by packaging – the boxes, the tissue paper, the carrier bags. Clarks saw the importance of this as long ago as the 1880s, when for the first time a pair of shoes could be bought in a box, at an additional charge of one penny on cheaper lines, or free if the overall cost came to more than 6 shillings. Then, in 1893, C. & J. Clark created its own carton-making department and almost all its shoes could be bought in boxes at no extra cost.

  Total sales of Clarks shoes in 1900 had reached £140,000, of which around 60 per cent was accounted for by the home market. And Street, once a small village through which people would pass on the way to Glastonbury or further west, was a thriving town of almost 4,000 inhabitants–thanks entirely to a tiny slipper business that had grown to become an international shoe giant.

  In 1879, twelve months before the strike at C. & J. Clark, Eleanor, James’s wife, died. She had been ill for a number of years after suffering from congestion of the lungs. The final months of her life saw Eleanor mainly confined to the house and she was unable to go upstairs unaided. In summer, she would be taken in a pony carriage into the countryside, and James and she occasionally would stay a night with friends. Of his wife’s death, James recorded that:

  … it pleased the Master to take my loved one to himself … words cannot convey an idea of the abiding sense of loneliness that has been my position … since the severance after nearly 45 years of union.

  However, three years later in 1882, James married Sarah Brockbank Satterthwaite, the widow of Michael Satterthwaite, a former physician and schoolmaster. He and Sarah, who was seven years his junior, were both active in the Quaker ministry in Street and in the USA. ‘Heavenly Father had given her ten extra years of life to travel in America and another ten to marry James Clark’ wrote James’s grandson, Roger, in his journal dated 28 February 1903. By all accounts, James and Sarah spent 24 happy years together.

  James became increasingly religious. Almost every morning at 7.30 am, he read the Bible at a small gathering of workers and in the course of one year during his retirement he made a point of visiting every Clarks employee in his or her own home. The Society of Friends’ Annual Monitor of 1907 spoke of James’s last few years as being a time when he ‘accepted cheerfully and without a murmur’ the restrictions of old age:

  To the end, his interest was keen in all passing events in the village in which his long life had been spent, in the Society to whose welfare so much of his time had been devoted, and in the wider political life of the country. His cheerful spirit, and gratitude for every little attention, were much appreciated by his attendants. If, as occasionally happened, a certain impatience in his natural disposition found expression in words, the humble apologies he would quickly make to those about him affected them deeply.

  On 28 December 1905, James woke early and said to his family:

  I have given myself to the Lord tonight more entirely than I have ever done before, and he has promised me that His way shall be easy for me, and His burden light. And now I am wholly given up to the Lord.

  A few weeks later, he started to weaken and on 15 January 1906, he said: ‘If I should pass away tonight tell William especially I have nothing of my own to look to, nothing to trust in, only in Jesus!’

  He survived until the morning, when his family gathered around his bed. ‘I want to go to sleep’ he said. Half an hour later, he was dead, the end coming ‘so quietly that it was difficult to know when the gentle breathing ceased,’ recorded Roger Clark. James was 95 when he died.

  5

  A business for the benefit of all

  ‘OF COURSE I START WITH THE HEEL,’ said Manolo Blahnik, the Spanish fashion designer and High Priest of the stiletto, in a 2010 interview with Vogue. ‘Always! The heel is the most important part of the shoe, and the most difficult part. I have spent 35 years trying to make the perfect heel.’

  In Street at the end of the nineteenth century, the debate was not so much about the height of heels as style versus comfort and the practicalities of combining both. Fashions were changing and younger members of the Clark family thought the company needed to move with the times. There was a danger of being left behind. For William S. Clark and his generation it was a case of coming to terms with the ‘Belle Epoque’ era, generally acknowledged as running from 1890 to 1914, when music, the arts and literature flourished, while the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the ascension to the throne of Edward VII was hastening the shift from Victorian formality to Edwardian frivolity. The new king enjoyed the company of women and was keen to see more of them. Hips became curvier, chests fuller, waists narrower.

  Cometh the hour, cometh the much-celebrated hourglass figure, as bustles and heavy petticoats retreated into the sartorial distance. Women began joining men in the pursuit of leisure. They took up golf, croquet, fencing, riding and cycling – and needed to be shod accordingly. This called for an element of swagger to be introduced to the Clarks showcards, not least because America was stealing a march on many of its rivals in Britain.

  Shoemakers on the other side of the Atlantic were experimenting in new, informal designs and offering them at temptingly low prices. Clarks was only too aware of this development because the company’s Quaker connections in America gathered intelligence to feed back to Somerset. This link with the United States was further strengthened in 1900 when Roger Clark, William’s second son, married a cousin, Sarah Bancroft, from Wilmington, Delaware, whom he had met during a sales tour of North America.

  Roger had joined the company after leaving Bootham School in 1888 at the age of seventeen. At first, he worke
d in the counting house at Clark, Son & Morland, the rug business that was hived off from C. & J. Clark shortly after William took over as chairman. In 1890, Roger embarked upon two years studying dyeing and chemistry at the Victoria College in Leeds, but to little advantage because he suffered from severe eczema. Selling was one of his strengths and to this end he joined his brother, John Bright Clark, on a worldwide business tour in 1898.

  John Bright Clark was four years older than Roger. He, too, had been educated at Bootham, returning to Street in 1884 after passing the London Matriculation Examination. He spent several years moving from one department at C. & J. Clark to another, including, at the age of nineteen, being taught the fundamentals of hand-sewn shoemaking from an outworker called Charles Maidment, who lived in Street’s Cranhill Road.

  Both John Bright Clark and Roger Clark were dogged by poor health. Roger spent periods of his early life in Davos Platz in Switzerland and at Nordrach in the Black Forest, Germany. In fact, he was so impressed by the healing properties of Nordrach that he became a great supporter and benefactor of an English version of this health spa, which was set up near Charterhouse in the Mendip Hills.

  Roger was ‘a sensitive man … with leanings towards socialism and a classless Christian ethic, who had to come to terms with his own position as a born capitalist’ according to Percy Lovell in Quaker Inheritance, 1871–1961. He was a great lover of Thomas Hardy novels, folk music, the William Morris arts and crafts movement, Pre-Raphaelite art, Gilbert and Sullivan musicals and the plays of Henrik Ibsen, all of which informed what Lovell called his ‘genuine concern for the poor and underprivileged’.

  Roger Clark wearing apprentice’s working clothes at Clark, Son & Morland in Glastonbury in 1888.

  It was hoped that John Bright’s and Roger’s trip abroad would be good for their health. They set out from Plymouth, calling in at Gibraltar, Marseilles and Naples, and then sailed through the Suez Canal. Roger spent a fortnight in Cairo, later joining up with John Bright in Adelaide before they both moved on to America. In September 1898, John Bright was called back to Street to help in the factory following a tragedy. Joseph Law, a well-regarded and highly talented foreman of the making and finishing departments, had died in an accident involving one of the factory lifts.

  Roger, meanwhile, went on to stay with his cousins, the Bancrofts, in Delaware, which was where he met Sarah, and within weeks they were engaged. Such was the haste of their courtship that it was decided to keep the engagement a secret from everyone except close family for six months. And the wedding would not be for a further eighteen months.

  Sarah’s father, William Bancroft, came from a family of Lancashire Quakers who had been successful in the cotton mill industry. They had emigrated to America in 1822, setting up a cotton manufacturing and finishing company in Rockford, Delaware, on the banks of the Brandywine river. In 1865, this business became known as Joseph Bancroft & Sons. William Bancroft’s younger brother, Samuel, was made president of the firm, but also took an active part in politics, first as a Republican, then a Democrat. An avid collector of art, in 1890 he bought his first Pre-Raphaelite painting, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Water Willow, and went on to amass the biggest Pre-Raphaelite collection outside Britain. After his death in 1915, his family donated his paintings to the Wilmington Society of Fine Arts, which is now part of the Delaware Art Museum. Sarah’s mother, Emma, was also descended from English Quakers, but her ancestors had moved to America much earlier, in 1679.

  Shortly before Roger asked Sarah to marry him, his mother wrote to his brother John Bright Clark and referred to a visit to England by the Bancrofts:

  They are all very nice people. He [William] very good and sincere, rather a character, very simple and friendly though very prosperous … the two girls are very attractive.

  After assessing his future son-in-law’s potential, William Bancroft suggested to Roger that he should stay in Delaware and join the Bancroft family firm rather than return to Clarks in Street, an offer that was politely declined. ‘They wanted me so much to go and live in America but I could not feel that that was the right place for me’ wrote Roger in a letter to his aunt, Priscilla Bright McLaren, on 11 May 1899.

  But not taking the job meant returning to England and living on a separate continent from his 21-year-old fiancée. In twice-weekly letters, Roger and Sarah shared their hopes and aspirations, agreeing on the importance of education, the emancipation of women, the fight against racism and the so-called ‘new look’ of Quakerism, described graphically by Roger as a turning away from the ‘horrid old theory of sacrifice, substitution, propitiation, bargain-driving with Satan, and so forth’.

  Their letters hinted at the challenges faced by the new generation of Clarks and how they would take the various businesses forward, while at the same time fulfilling their wider responsibilities to the community. But mainly the correspondence concentrated on a mutual desire to be together. Roger had already decided that he wanted them to live in Overleigh rather than Greenbank, William S. Clark’s former house, where he said they could get away with only one servant and establish a ‘really nice snug home’.

  In a letter dated 27 April 1899, Roger wrote:

  My own sweet love,

  What a lovely letter thou has sent me. I cannot tell thee half the glad happiness it has brought me … I read it alone after tea. Thou must not be sorry thou wrote that other letter; I would rather by far have thee brought so close to me as I feel that thou has been, by letting me share in thy perplexities, as well as in thy certainties; for we shall always share them when they come to us, n’est ce pas? Thou hast always been far too good to me, sweet. I must keep in mind not to be spoiled.

  That summer, Roger appeared to be getting in touch with his rustic side, telling Sarah:

  I should like to take my bath always out of doors. It makes you feel so akin to the earth to stand naked on the grass with the delicious sun pouring down upon you; and after pouring the water all over me from as high as I could reach, my whole being seemed to give itself up to the simple enjoyment of the divine reaction and glow over body and limbs.

  A couple of paragraphs later, he reverted to the more mundane topic of work and reflected again on William Bancroft’s job proposal:

  I have been in the Boot Factory at a fresh job. I find it very hard to feel much satisfaction in taking up this new business; it is so complicated and full of detail. I am sure it would have been a fatal error to have attempted something similar in your mills at Rockford.

  Sarah replied:

  I should think the new business would worry thee. It would worry me dreadfully, even though I should like the learning, even the dull parts, but that too would weigh upon me when I thought of the wearisomeness of doing nothing else all one’s life … I wonder what the ambition of people who do such work can be. I should think it would kill all one’s ambition. And the moment one looks forward to some better work one begins to worry for fear one will not succeed. Oh, there are many difficulties along our pathways, aren’t there? But it is better so, of course.

  The wedding eventually took place in the drawing room of the Bancroft family home in Rockford on 18 June 1900 and was attended by some 80 people. Roger’s parents, William and Helen, had sailed to America a few weeks before the ceremony, keen to see as much of the country as possible. In particular, Helen, as if doing the bidding of her reformist father, John Bright MP, ‘was always sniffing for evidence of colour prejudice and, not surprisingly, found ammunition in plenty’ according to Lovell.

  Sarah did not find the transition from Delaware to Somerset always easy, but maintained close ties with her family, especially her sister Lucy, who also married an English Quaker, Dr Henry Gillett, and lived in Banbury Road, Oxford. Then, two years after setting up home together in Street, Roger and Sarah’s first child was born, a boy named William Bancroft Clark in deference to both the infant’s grandfathers. From an early age, he was known as Bancroft.

  The infusion of young blood at the top
of the company was encouraged by William S. Clark and formally acknowledged in 1903 when C. & J. Clark became a private limited liability company, with nominal capital of £160,000, preference shares of £100,000 and £60,000 ordinary shares. Five directors were appointed, all of them for life under the Articles of Association. William, who was now 64 and beginning to suffer from arthritis, remained as chairman and his co-directors were his brother, Frank, and three of his children, John Bright Clark, 36, Roger Clark, 32, and Alice Clark, 29.

  Of the directors, Frank was the biggest shareholder with around 20,000 Ordinary shares, followed by William (with 18,000), John Bright (12,000), Roger (4,000) and Alice (3,000). The remaining shareholders were William’s three other daughters, Esther Clothier (1,000), Margaret Clark Gillett (1,000) and Hilda Clark (1,000).

  Alice, who as a young girl had been sick with tuberculosis and who experienced poor health all through her life, joined the company in 1893 at the age of eighteen. She attended, briefly, a course in housewifery at Bristol, something that may have been lost on her given that she never married – although she was regarded as a great beauty – and went on to became an active campaigner for women’s suffrage. After four years learning how the factory operated, she went to work for Thomas Lugton, a Clarks agent in Edinburgh’s Princes Street, returning to Street as supervisor of the Machine Room. Later, she was responsible for the Trimming Room and the Turnshoe department, and was one of only a small group of women to reach a managerial position in industrial Britain at the start of the twentieth century.

  The new, younger directors of what was now C. & J. Clark Ltd recognised that as a result of imports of cheaper footwear from America, many British manufacturers were turning their attention to what at the time was called the ‘better class trade’. Shoemakers throughout the country were determined to raise their collective game and were prepared to implement aggressive ways of increasing home production. How to attract a ‘better class of trade’ was a conundrum. It was William who, in 1897, came to the realisation that C. & J. Clark should forge closer ties with London’s fashionable West End, and at one point a suitably well-established shoemaker called A. McAfee was identified as a potential partner in the capital. McAfee was a bespoke shoemaker. The plan was that he would open a new shop selling shoes made by C. & J. Clark in addition to his own lines.